


panic stations

by jamnesias



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Implied Relationships, M/M, Pack Dynamics, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 03:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/857465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamnesias/pseuds/jamnesias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek POV, post episode 3x04. </p><p>'After the alphas and Deucalion have left, Derek shudders once but doesn’t curl over around the hole in his abdomen like he wants to. He stays flat on his back. Shock sets in with tremors down his legs. He wants to retch but the muscles are severed.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	panic stations

**Author's Note:**

> A 3x04 coda Derek POV for some of those missing moments and thoughts. SILLY, STUPID WOLF. And many plot holes in the new series' writing. Sigh.

**panic stations**

After the alphas and Deucalion have left, Derek shudders once but doesn’t curl over around the hole in his abdomen like he wants to. He stays flat on his back. Shock sets in with tremors down his legs. He wants to retch but the muscles are severed.

Cora’s knees are warm against his side, her hands flat on the floor in his blood. He gasps, pants, mouth open at the ceiling. She sits silently. He curls his fists, opens them, swallows the agony, drinks it down and wills the pain back into his body, wills the flesh to knit, wills his sister to look away.

“Derek?” she breathes, reaching out. Instinct.

She touches the well at the bottom of his gasping throat gently, carefully, with just two fingertips. They slip in his sweat, then sit, steady. He cants his eyes to her sideways, shuddering again as his body fights to heal and his wolf fights to howl with the realisation that they are cornered, outnumbered, _vulnerable._ Cora is biting her lip. She shakes her head, her eyes welling with tears. When she bites through her lip the smell of her blood is fresher than his, a flash, the red flare of familiar. Red burn. The kick and pull.

Slowly she spreads her fingers flat on his chest, and watches her hand lift up and down as his heart hammers, then slows, as his gasps become pants, then breath. His body heals but the panic and fear remain, bitter. He feels emptied.

Panic and fear are a weakness, a fresh wound.

They are _fucked_.

* * *

 

Later, after, he can still hear the reverb of the glass smashing in the highest range of his hearing. Like the prickle of static before a storm, like a _howl_ carried across a forest or an arrow sliding, slick, into his blood and up through his heart, buzzing-- 

He hunches over the desk, over his healed stomach. They're all in terrible, stupid danger and he has to _focus_. To lead.

Stiles is the only one of them that is good at panic. Bright, erratic heartbeat human _panic_. Derek has the sudden, insane desire to call him. To ask his advice. To drop to his knees and bury his head in Stiles’s stomach and whine, if he’s honest. But Stiles would probably just laugh hysterically, skitter away, shake his head. Derek can’t look at him properly half of the time, let alone ask him. Of course. He can’t show that weakness. Stiles’s mouth is incessant and too distracting; it does something to Derek's _gut_ that makes him harsh with the boy.

He’s that way with all of them, he knows. He sees Cora watching him watch her and not knowing how to touch her. She was a child when he saw her last. Now she’s nearly as tall as him. How did she survive, how did she grow up, with _who_ — He can’t ask. If he does she will probably kick him right now, beta or no. Right in the throat. That’s not the girl he remembers, but the woman that came back. A stranger.

He told Isaac he was swapping them, essentially. Made _him_ a stranger. Push him away to protect him. How else to touch him? How to touch any of them. Like how he wanted to bite the nape of Isaac’s neck before he left, to show him _something_ , to help him, as if it would _._ Like he sometimes just wants to breathe in the steady scent of Scott, _Scott_ , who has veered from earnest to naive to pseudo-alpha to hero to traitor to friend to pack so fast in the last year that Derek almost feels bruised from their repeated collisions with one another. They’re like a hit and run accident at this point. He feels paralysed from it, from this revelation today, from losing Erica, from Boyd, from Deucalion’s blind, knowing touch. Like he never got out of that swimming pool last year. Like Stiles is still holding him above water and he can’t move his arms towards him or anyone else.

God-damnit _._ They have no idea, he had no idea how much danger they’re all in, and fucking _Stiles_ has no idea that he has that face, that throat. The kick and pull of him, under Derek’s ribs, always at the back of his mind. He stares down at the wooden desk, half instinct and half busy, busy thoughts he can’t voice. Dealing with these teenagers is like punching through another wall. He just got a hole punched through _him._

Shit.

* * *

 

Cora climbs out of bed just after 4am.

He’d given her his bed to help her heal when they’d come back the day before, laying her down on the sheets slowly, probably too carefully, in lingering disbelief, in reverence and guilt at the slashes across her side that he’d put there. Taken in the sight of her properly, for the first time. _Cora_. He’d moved a loose hair carefully off her forehead, then left her to sleep.

Isaac had the other bed. Derek had put himself on the couch. Technically now he could have moved into Isaac’s room, but. Not yet.

Cora had tried to tell him to take his own bed back since he was the one healing now, give _her_ the couch,but he’d continued to refuse until she’d snarled in frustration and spun on her heel, stormed off into the dim of the bedroom area with her ponytail swinging.

Neither of them had suggested she take Isaac’s.

He knows his own reasons, but isn't exactly sure of hers.

He wasn’t sleeping anyway but is still impressed at how quiet she is as she pads over. She stands next to the couch for a moment, looking down at him, rubbing one eye. Her frown is gone. She looks younger, with her hair down, her features softened.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks, then feels totally stupid for saying it.

He’s laced his fingers across his stomach where it still felt empty, tender. She glances down at them, then sighs, nudges his thigh with her knee.

“Move.”

He does, unsure — she sits and then stretches out carefully next to him. Arm against his arm, leg against his, flat on her back the same way, crossing her ankles like his. It’s tight. He tries not to stiffen in surprise, tries to look easy, open, tries to stay looking up out of the window, tries not to push his face into her throat and breathe in her smell and wrap his fingers in her t-shirt, in her hair, in something he thought he had utterly lost. He looks forward instead.

His legs are too long for the couch, his calves just on the arm of the sofa and his feet hanging off in the air, but hers fit perfectly. The sight of their feet next to each others’ makes his throat close, suddenly.

They are silent, for a minute. He glances at her sideways; her profile staring resolutely at the clouds through the window.

“You can’t be comfortable,” he says.

“Nope.”

He frowns. “If my bed is— You can take Isaac’s bed, Cora.”

She turns her head and looks him square in the face. He doesn’t flinch. Their noses almost touch. She has their father’s eyes, brown where his are more blue-grey, and hers are lit and wet with tears again.

“It won’t smell like you,” she whispers. All of a sudden she takes a shuddering breath in and hiccupssays, “Even _you_ don’t smell enough like you to make me feel better, and I’m freaked the fuck out right now, Derek, so shut up, okay?”

His stomach drops, turning over as it goes. He swallows, moves a hand, and touches her upper arm. “Okay.”

She turns her head back.

They look up at the lack of moon together. He flicks his toes against the bottom of her bare foot after a few minutes, testing. She half-smiles, then lets it fade.

“You’re an idiot,” she says, out of nowhere.

He nods once, slow. Deliberate. Chin down to chest and back. His head squeaks against the leather. “Yeah.”

She cries quietly, then, her face in his neck, her body twisted up against him, her hands balled in fists against his ribs. He twists his fingers in her hair and breathes her in, in, in.

Deep breath.


End file.
